According to university officials, last week's enrollment freeze will have few effects on UW-Madison's enrollment, a situation that is not shared at all UW System institutions.
Keith White, UW-Madison associate director of admissions, said the admissions process at UW-Madison was nearly complete before last Friday's announcement by the UW System Board of Regents that the enrollment process had to be halted.
\We stopped accepting freshmen applications on Feb. 1. The bulk of our decisions came before that,"" White said. ""For freshman, up until Friday of last week when the suspension of admission hit, we pretty much had everything wrapped up. Decisions had been made. ... Basically, we were done.""
Though she did not have official statistics on any UW school, UW System President Katharine Lyall, said admissions at UW-Madison were ""very, very close"" to being filled.
She also said that ""several"" UW System schools had already closed admissions before the process was frozen. Specifically, Lyall said UW-Green Bay and UW-La Crosse had filled their enrollment targets.
However, Lyall said, state universities that typically enroll large numbers of commuter and part-time students are further away from filling their enrollment caps since these students generally apply later in the year than full-time students do. For that reason, the enrollment freeze would more likely affect these campuses.
""[Campuses] like Milwaukee and Parkside and the two-year colleges are further away from being fully enrolled at this point and have some extra capacity but they don't have any money,"" Lyall said.
UW-Milwaukee, White said, traditionally does not fill its enrollment cap until spring and even summer so it would be another example of a school affected by last Friday's action.
Applications for enrollment at UW-Madison were up 8 percent this year, White said. However, the school was forced to admit 200 to 300 fewer students than this year's freshman class, the largest in school history, he added.
""What's happening is that we're down lots and lots of students, but that doesn't have anything to do with this freeze,"" White said.
Last week's budget freeze was in response to uncertainty surrounding state funding for the UW System in the next years. Originally, under Gov. Scott McCallum's budget proposal to remedy the state's $1.1 billion budget deficit, the UW System was required to cut $50.5 million. After amendments to McCallum's budget were passed by the Joint Finance Committee, budget cuts looked like they would be closer to $70 million.
Regent President Jay Smith then delivered a pessimistic message at the March 7 regents meeting, saying the university may have to cut enrollment if it did indeed have to deal with additional budget cuts. The final decision to halt enrollment was made Friday morning at the regents meeting.
